Zineb Ait Bahajji from Google’s Webmaster Trends team has been quoted saying that the planned mobile friendly ranking algorithm that is set to launch on April 21^st will have a greater impact on the SERPs than the Google Panda or Penguin updates had.

When the update was first announced, Google had said that it would have a “significant impact” on the results for searchers on mobile devices. Although the algorithm is only affecting the results on mobile phones, it is still said that it will have a greater impact than Panda or Penguin.

Perhaps Zineb meant that the impact would be greater in the way that the new algorithm will affect 40% of mobile search queries, compared with the Pand and Penguin updates which affected 12% and 4% of searches respectively.

Zineb did not release a specific percentage of queries that would be impacted by the update, but it is believed that around 50% of all searchers that are done on Google are done using a mobile device.

If your website is not yet mobile friendly and you depend on traffic from mobile devices at any level, then you need to look to update your website as soon as possible, as you will likely soon be seeing your traffic levels impacted.